


Grounded

by theradiointukyshead



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Guardian Angels, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 07:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6145942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theradiointukyshead/pseuds/theradiointukyshead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s a guardian angel and he’s prone to near-death experience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grounded

“You’re a lousy guardian angel.”

The girl picks at a stray feather from her folded wings, huffs. “Your options were limited. It was either living with a broken arm or dying under a truck.”

Light pours in from the open window. The edges of her soften and dissolve into the garden, the sky, those clouds the shape of upside-down butterflies. Hazy and half-in-love, he hops off the hospital bed and turns to her. “Tell me, would angels be opposed to a cup of coffee?”

-

He wakes up with dry mouth and a splitting headache, back aching from his friend’s uncomfortable beat-up couch. There are two glasses of water on the tea table. She hands one over for him to drink and empties the other one on his head.

“You’re reckless and stupid and quite frankly too old for this,” she scolds, tosses him the car key he’s been searching all night yesterday.

“You hid this,” says him. Water drips from his hair, into his eyes, and his vision is awash in the watercolor of her features. He’s hungover, can’t see straight, can’t think straight, but he knows for sure what he will do next.

He leans in to kiss her forehead and mouths a soft _thank you_.

-

The day his father dies, he drives and drives and drives until it’s just him and the tarmac and the unkind blinks of dusk. Four hours away from the city, from where the hurt is, he pounds the steering wheel until his knuckles split open. Blood trickles down his fingers like he’s just reached into his own chest and plucked all the blood vessels.

A flutter of wings.

She appears by the window and leads him out by his bloodied hands. Perched on the trunk of his car, arm brushing arm, heart against heart, they sit without talking. He listens to the whisper of his pulse, knowing it echoes that of another person, and wishes people wouldn’t overlook the simple act of _just being_. It’s an unlikely miracle, and it’s enough. If only his father was still here to share it with him.  

“My dad, he’s – uh,” he clears his throat, “he was a Catholic. Big believer of heaven and hell. It made death a little comforting for him, but I’ve never actually believed it.”

And it’s a silly thing to say, when a guardian angel is right next to him. Still, she folds her hands on her lap and nods as he continues, “we comfort the dead, but what about the living? There’s no peace for those who stay.”

She reaches out, wipes away a single tear from his cheek, and tilts his head up to meet the sky with her delicate fingers. Night has fallen, and if it had a touch, it would feel like hers. At last, she says, “that’s why God made the stars.”

-

“What’s heaven like?”

“I have no memory of it. All has been erased, and I can’t go back.”

“Why?”

“I saved a human who was supposed to die.”

-

There’s an equipment malfunction when he goes scuba-diving, and he wakes up on the shore with a set of lungs that’s on fire, clogging up his throat with smoke. She’s by his side, her wings soaked through and through, feathers drooping from the weight of water. She’s dragged him up from the bottom, and she makes it look beautiful, this sinking, aching callousness of the sea.

“How could _you_ of all people not check the equipme– ” Something dawns on her just then. “You wanted to drown.”

He coughs, tries to find his voice. “A life for a life. I just want to restore the cosmos to its equilibrium.”

What he doesn’t say is this: _my life isn’t worth trading yours for._

So she kisses him, and her lips are screaming _it is, it is_. There’s a hint of the sea in how she tastes, and they sink deeper, a quiet desperation to crash, and mire, and overwhelm.

-

“Why was the kitchen on fire?”

He shuffles from foot to foot, the tips of his ears a bright shade of red. “I was trying to make you…something nice.”

At this, she uncrosses her arms. Throwing open the window, she plunges out and takes flight without a word. He thinks she might just be done with his acute proneness to near-death experience, but a moment later she’s back, towing pizza and a liter of Mountain Dew. “Something nice,” she announces.

It’s an ordinary sort of beautiful, the two of them sitting on the fire escape, her fingers smearing grease on his shirt and tangling into the veins underneath his skin. He chugs the Mountain Dew, burps dramatically. She laughs. For a while everything feels all right.

-

And the funny thing is, she can handle reckless drivers and not-drowning and dumb mistakes, but when death takes, it just takes.

This illness is a part of him, the traitorous thing. She can’t rage against something that kills him from the inside out.

He’s on a hospital bed, she’s sitting with her back to the window, and it is just like the first time they met each other. If this is some kind of grand-scheme joke, then it is a malicious one.

“I’m scared. What if nothing compares to the way your eyes look in the sun?” he asks.

“Don’t worry. If all else fails we’ll always have the stars.” She smiles the way you do so your heart doesn’t break too loudly, and he thinks that perhaps the greatest punishment for immortals is to make them fall in love with humans.

In the days that follow he drifts in and out of agonizing delirium, calling her name like a deeply shaken and unholy hymn. Tethering the edge of consciousness, the last thing he remembers is her lips against his ear, telling him about a last bargain, and her grace as she leaps out of the window and soars. Up and up. Until he can no longer tell her wings and the clouds apart.

Girl of burning, girl of light.

He closes his eyes and lets darkness take over.

-

She stands in front of the mirror and stares intently. A wide-eyed reflection stares back at her. It is real. It is as real as it can be.

A single gray hair.

“I’m aging.”

“Yes you are.”

He’s behind her now, kissing the scars on her shoulder-blades where her wings used to be, kissing up her neck and to her lips and kissing and kissing and kissing…

_A life for a life. Restoring the cosmos to its equilibrium._

The mattress shifts, and they float like feathers into the soft weightlessness of _just being_.


End file.
